With the posting of this entry I will be taking a bit of a break . . . regular posts will resume on September 6, but for now I invite you to think about these thoughts from William Sloane Coffin*:

There are people and things in this world, and people are to be loved and things are to be used.  And it is increasingly important that we love people and use things, for there is so much in our gadget-minded, consumer-oriented society that is encouraging us to love things and use people. (35)

William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

With gratitude to William Sloane Coffin*:

There is in other words a difference between having a friend and being a friend, between having success and being successful, between getting an education and becoming learned.  If we use knowledge, music, art, sports, and eminently others – if we use them just to enrich ourselves, then paradoxically we impoverish ourselves, at least at our very core.  For all things then become as clothes: they cover but they do not touch or develop our inner being, and we become as those who believe they can only become visible when something visible covers the surface.

But if we give ourselves to art, music, sports, knowledge, and eminently to others, then we expeirence that biblical truth that “he who loses his life shall find it,” shall find life being fulfilled, and find that joy is self-fulfillment, self-fulfillment is joy.

For joy is to escape from the prison of selfhood and to enter by love into union with the life that dwells and sings within the essence of every other thing and in the core of our own souls.  Joy is to feel the doors of the self fly open into a wealth that is endless because none of it is ours and yet it all belongs to us. (122-123)

*William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville: Wesminster John Knox Press, 2004.

One more selection of valuable words from Bill Robinson’s book Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus*:

In some ways, it’s easier to demand openness from our organizations than from ourselves.  What do we do when no one is watching, or a least when we think no one is watching?  For most leaders, someone usually is.  I’ve heard integrity defind as “what a person does when no one is looking.”  It’s hard to deny that we feel greater temptation to breach our standards of honesty and consistency when the bright light of accountability goes dark.  Well, here’s a thought: keep the light on.  Paul calls it not making provision for “the flesh” or sin (Romans 13:14 KJV).

I am not implying that integrity requires openness.  Some leaders maintain the highest level of integrity while functioning quite privately in their personal and professional lives.  But openness does encourage integrity.  When Christian leaders subject themselves to visibility and accountability, they reduce dramatically the likelihood of moral or ethical compromises.  Leaders whose assistants always know their whereabouts will like be smart in choosing “where they are about.”

We can all take measures to “keep the light on.”  Positions of leadership often require travel, and travel has gotten brutal.  By the time I arrive at my destination, I’m a wreck.  Agitated, alone in a distant city, feeling deprived at having to be absent from my family, and needing relief from the indignities of air travel, I’m not at the height of my moral strength.  So when I fire up my computer, I find myself tempted to click my way from e-mail to e-crap.  But I don’t.  And one of the reasons I don’t is because I have given permission to our information technology people to check the logs of the websites I’ve visited without notifying me.  Do that and you’ll think twice before you click on garbage.  (Incidentally, a surprising number of people in leadership fail to realize their organizations can track down every website they’ve ever visited.)  I’ve also found that the deprivations of travel can tempt me to live more luxuriously on my business expense account than I would on my own money.  Personally, I don’t think that’s right, so I’ve welcomed people to review my expense reports if they have questions.  Whether our temptations are prompted by travel or by other conditions, the accountability of openness can only help us be the people of integrity God calls us to be. (53-54)

*Robinson, Bill.  Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009.

Currently I am busy preparing for several new and exciting adventures that will begin in the next few weeks.  One of those will be leading a teaching team in a series of gatherings that we will call Living as Mustard Seeds in Cracked Clay Pots.  The series will begin on Monday evening, September 19, 2011 at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas at 6:30.  All – visitors, members, anyone – are welcome!

We will begin with a six week consideration of a marvelous book by Dr. Bill Robinson, retired President of Whitworth University, titled Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus*.  Bill’s book offers remarkable guidance for learning leadership and living.  I hope some of you might join us.  Here is a sample from Dr. Robinson’s book:

Humility’s Ally – Truth

Another way leaders can keep from wearing those jerseys of darkness that absorb the light is to put on the bright reflecting colors of truth.  If God got nothing more out of Christian leaders than the truth, he’d probably consider it progress.  Truth protects against pride because truth recognizes that every gift comes from God.  Truth recognizes grace as the means of our salvation and nothing about which we can boast.  Truth recognizes that the mirror is but a mirror; it’s not the object it reflects.

Truth also competes against a besetting tendency of Christian leaders: We like to spiritualize our accomplishments.  When we attribute a success to God, report why God gave the success, and claim we had nothing to do with the success, we’re speculating.  We don’t know the mind and motives of God.  “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).  Further, our efforts do play a role in what we achieve.  The truths is that when we do the work, God gives the increase.  Scripture connects labor with fruit; if you do the former, you get the latter.  That connection doesn’t give us bragging rights; it simply acknowledges that God uses flawed people to accomplish his purposes. (66)

We are indeed mustard seeds living in cracked clay pots!

*Robinson, Bill.  Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus.  Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2009.

The claim of biblical authority is not difficult as it pertains to the main affirmation of apostolic faith.  But from that base line, the hard, disputatious work is interpretation that needs to be recognized precisely for what it is:  nothing other than interpretation.  The Bible, our mothers and fathers have always known, is not self-evident and self-interpreting, and the Reformers did not mean that at all when they escaped the church’s magisterium.  Rather, the Bible requires and insists upon human interpretation that is inescapably subjective, necessarily provisional, and, as you are living witnesses, inevitably disputatious.

I propose as an interpretive rule that all of our subjective, provisional, disputatious interpretation be taken, at most, with quite tentative authority, in order that we may (1) make our best, most insistent claims, but then, with some regularity, we may (2) relinquish our pet interpretations and, together with our partners in dispute, fall back in joy into the inherent apostolic claims that outdistance all our too familiar and too partisan interpretations.  We may learn from the rabbis the marvelous rhythm of deep interpretive dispute and profound common yielding in joy and affectionate well-being.  The sometimes characteristic and demonic mode of Reformed interpretation is not tentativeness and relinquishment but tentativenss that is readily hardened into absoluteness, whether of the right or of the left, of exclusive or of inclusive, a sleight-of-hand act of substituting our interpretive preference for the inherency of apostolic claims. (13-14)

Brueggemann, Walter.  “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection.”  Struggling with Scripture.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.  5-31.

Thought provoking words from Walter Brueggemann*:

The issue of the authority of the Bible is a perennial and urgent one for those of us who claim and intend to stake our lives on its attestation.  But for all of the perennial and urgent qualities of the question, the issue of biblical authority is bound, in any case, to remain endlessly unsettled and therefore, I believe, perpetually disputatious.  It cannot be otherwise, and so we need not hope for a “settlement” of the issue.  The unsettling and disputatious quality of the question is, I believe, given in the text itself, because the bible is ever so endlessly “strange and new.” (The phrase is an allusion to the famous essay of Karl Barth, “The Strange, New World within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man.  New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1957, 28-50.)  It always, inescapably, outdistances our categories of understanding and explanation, of interpretation and control.  Because the Bible is, as we confess, “the live word of the living God,” it will not submit in any compliant way to the accounts we prefer to give of it.  There is something intrinsically unfamiliar about the book, and when we seek to override that unfamiliarity we are on the hazardous ground of idolatry. (5)

*Brueggemann, Walter.  “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection.”  Struggling with Scripture.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. 5-31.

If we’re talking about changing a society that yields most painfully to change, we are really talking about being good stewards not only in our vocations, but in the public realm.  The important decisions in our time – whether there will be peace or war, freedom or totalitarianism, racial equality or discrimination, homophilia or homophobia, food or famine – all these are political decisions.  To Christians, political decisions are not at the center of their faith; they are at the periphery of their faith.  But without a periphery there can be no center.  A center without a periphery is a contradiction in terms.  Together, faith in Jesus Christ and political application of that faith form one unbroken circle.

When to stress their distinction and when to stress their unity depends almost entirely on the situation.  Not every political issue of the day demands a decision from the churches, and I feel strongly that churches should not pursue political goals that are self-serving or parochial.  I hate to see Chrstians try to legislate their convictions on divorce or abortion into state or federal law.  I hate to see Christians fight to establish Sunday blue laws, or try to keep creches on public greens, or prayer in and evolution out of public schools.

But I love to see Chrstians enter the fray on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, to fight for housing for low-income families, for decent health care for the aging, for fair treatment for minorities, for peace for everyone – provided they always remember that there are many causes and more than one solution to problems of injustice and war.  Most of all, in these times that are neither safe nor sane, I love to see Christians risk maximum fidelity to Jesus Christ when they can expect minimal support from the prevailing culture.  I have in mind what the prophet Nathan did to King David – he spoke truth to power. (147-148)

William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Another excerpt from Credo* by William Sloane Coffin:

No two Shakespearean actors have ever sounded exactly alike, and no two readers of the Declaration of Independence, or of the Constitution of the United States, or of the sixty-six books of the Bible, will ever understand those documents in exactly the same way.  Let Protestant fundamentalists claim, “The only safe interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself.”  It’s a fine sounding claim, but it is pride masquerading as humility to believe that one can see so plainly revealed the mind and will of God.  Search for the truth we can and must, but own it – never.

Fundamentalists are no different from the rest of us.  Just as often as do we, they use a Bible as a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.  And consider this:  perhaps God approves the struggles of the human mind to try to interpret God’s designs.  “The unknown is the mind’s greatest need, and for it no one thinks to thank God” (Emily Dickinson).  So far from being a danger to it, difference of opinion is an essential ingredient of religious life, just as difference of opinion is no danger but an essential ingredient to a helathy political life.  So interpretation is not only inevitable; it’s desirable. (156)

*William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Recently, I discovered a book that was published in 2004, and I am sad that I have not known it until now.  This book contains a series of writings by William Sloane Coffin and carries the title, Credo*.  The following words are from the book’s Preface and are by William Sloane Coffin.  They merit our prayerful consideration.

Credo – I believe – best translates “I have given my heart to.”  However imperfectly, I have given my heart to the teaching and example of Christ, which, among many other things, informs my understanding of faiths other than Christianity.

Certainly religions are different.  Still most seek to fulfill the same function; that is, they strive to convert people from self-preoccupation to the wholehearted giving of oneself in love for God and for others.  To love God by loving neighbor is an impulse equally at the heart of Chrstianity, Judaism, and Islam.  It therefore makes eminent sense in today’s fractured world for religious people to move from truth-claiming to the function truth plays.

Moreover, when we consider how, on a whole range of questions – from the number of sacraments to the ordination of women, pacifism, abortion, and homosexuality – Christians cannot arrive at universal agreement, then we have to be impressed by a divine incomprehensibility so vast that no human being dare speak for the Almighty.  As St. Paul asks, “For who has known the mind of God?”  To learn from one another and to work together towards common goals of justice and peace – this surely is what suffering humanity has very right to expect of believers of all faiths. (xv)

*William Sloane Coffin.  Credo.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

In the last post I made reference to Dr. Walter Brueggemann’s Journey to the Common Good* noting particularly his writing that the “journey from anxious scarcity through miraculous abundance to a neighborly common good has been peculiarly entrusted to the church and its allies.” (32)

In this post we continue to consider Dr. Brueggemann’s eloquent words.  He writes about the feeding of the five thousand as recorded in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:30-44) and the feeding of four thousand people as recorded in Mark 8:1-10.  I encourage you to read these sections from the Gospel.  Dr. Brueggemann continues:

He [Jesus] wants them [the disciples] to reflect on his work of abundance.  But they avoided eye contact and make no response.  The disciples are beyond their interpretive capacity, because they do not know what to make of the new abudance caused by Jesus.

Like a good teacher, Jesus retreats to more concrete operational questions:

— How many baskets of bread were left over in chapter 6 when I fed five thousand?

— They are eager with an answer: “Twelve.”

— How many baskets of bread were left over in chapter 8 when I fed four thousand?

— They are eager with an answer:  “Seven!”

The disciples are very good at concrete operational questions.  They know the data, but they have no sense of its significance.  The narrative concludes with one of Jesus’ saddest verdicts:

Do you not yet understand?  Mark 8:21

Do you not understand that the ideology of scarcity has been broken, overwhelmed by the divine gift of abundance?

It is our propensity, in society and in church, to trust the narrative of scarcity.  That is what makes us greedy, and exclusive, and selfish, and coercive.  Even the Eucharist can be made into an occasion of scarcity, as though there were not enough for all.  Such scarcity leads to exclusion at the table, even as scarcity leads to exclusion from economic life.

But the narrative of abundance persists among us.  Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers of the neighborhood.  These are the ones not exhausted by Sabbath-less production who have enough energy to dream and hope.  From dreams and hopes come such neighborly miracles as good health care, good schools, good housing, good care for the earth, and disarmament.  The dream subverts Pharaoh’s nightmare.  Jesus laid it out, having read the exodus narrative:

“Do not be anxious” – do not trust Pharaoh; “Your heavenly father knows what you need” – then provides abundantly; “Seek the kindgom” – care for the neighborhood, and all will be well.  Matt 6:25-33

The ones who receive the gift have energy beyond themselves for the sake of the world.  And we, if we receive well, may be among those who push beyond ourselves. (34-35)

Are we stuck in the scarcity of operational-only understandings or are beginning to understand the significance of abundance?

*Brueggemann, Walter.  Journey to the Common Good.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.